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Embodied Conversational Agent

Finance ANR | 2008 - 2012

Project leader: Sylvie Pesty

This project concerns the interaction systems of new generation where the human user is at the core of the interaction. These systems are designed to be believable (i.e. not only trustworthy and honest, but also capable to give an illusion of life). Several studies show that the conception of this kind of systems can be realized only by integrating an advanced processing of emotions in the system. This is in order to endow the system with the capabilities to understand and to adapt to the user's emotions, to reason about the user's emotions, to plan its actions anticipating their effects on the user's emotions, and to express its emotions. These are necessary prerequisite to make the system capable to interact with the user in a natural way. The subject of emotions has been debated in the last twenty, thirty years in several disciples such as psychology, philosophy, cognitive sciences and economics. More recently, computer sciences have started to focus on emotions. Several computational models of the role of emotions in cognition and on the expression of affective contents have been proposed (e.g. the project on Affective Computing at MIT or the Kansei Information Processing in Japan). These researches have been at the basis of the development of several prototypes such as Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) to be used in different services (e.g. game platforms, simulators, tutoring agents, robotic assistants etc.)